Reading is defined as the multi-dimensional cognitive process of decoding symbols for the purpose of deriving meaning. In other words, reading is the ability to decode and comprehend text. The first aspect of reading is decoding; evaluating decoding speed is an indication of reading fluency.
Decoding involves the knowledge of individual sounds or phonemes (phonemic awareness), familiarity with the letters in the language (letter knowledge), and the knowledge that each letter corresponds with a specific sound (alphabetic principle). In order to bring clarity to these three steps, let us track the reading stages with the words ‘cat’ and ‘hat’. In the phonemic awareness stage, a child recognizes various sounds through oral and verbal interactions. The child unconsciously recognizes the hard ‘c’ sound before cat, and the soft ‘h’ sound before hat while listening and speaking. During the next stage of letter knowledge, a child learns his alphabet. In the last stage, alphabetic principle, the activities involved in the first two stages are combined. The child recognizes that the letter ‘C’ results in the hard ‘c’ sound in the word ‘cat,’ while the letter ‘H’ results in the soft ‘h’ sound in the word ‘hat.’ Decoding is the act of using the alphabetic principal to decipher words.
The above process outlines initial decoding—when a reader begins to slowly sound out words. Fluency in decoding, however, occurs when the reader has knowledge of larger units, allowing efficient reading without sounding out each letter. This knowledge allows automatically, which is decoding without conscience attention; readers are able to recognize and comprehend the text simultaneously. This degree of fluency causes the readers to lose careful attention to specific letters.
According to Jeanne Chall's research published in Chall's Stages of Reading Development, Scholastic Red., 2002, 1 Jul. 2008, there are five stages of reading development. The first consists of pre-reading, which is oral and verbal development in the language. The next stage is logographic reading, which is the ability to recognize signs and visual patterns in text. The next stage is early alphabetic reading, which is sound and letter correspondence. The fourth stage consists of memory for sight words and decoding by analogy. The last stage, orthographic reading, is the ability to decode whole words. This is the stage where the reader is considered fluent at decoding.
The embodiments disclosed herein build on Chall's five stages of reading development and my own prior research. In April 2007, I completed a research project entitled “Familiarity Breeds Contempt” to determine whether the familiarity of a language affects one's ability to recognize certain characters. Our method for conducting the research was through the use of two test that contained the same texts—one in English and the other in the Microsoft® font Webdings. We found that people are able to recognize an indicated symbol from an unfamiliar language more easily than an indicated letter from the English language. During the English phrase test, English was a visual distraction because fluent readers read whole words at a time, and thereby did not recognize the indicated letter as easily. In the Webdings phrase test, however, because there was no fluency in the language, the decoding process did not occur automatically and the individual symbol could be isolated.
The following were the two tests used in the prior research of April 2007:
Test One (F Test): Find the number of F's in the following statement: ALFRED FINDS THAT THE FRUIT OF HARD WORK IS ALWAYS SWEETER THAN TAKING THE CREDIT OF THE WORK OF ANOTHER.
Test Two (Symbols Test): Find the number of  in the following statement: 